Stormin’ Norman and Battlin’ Baldwin

Had a blast doing MSNBC’s The Cycle yesterday, a mere man of mortal clay surrounded by the Legion of Super Heroes, and yet I blabbed as best I could amid the dedazzlement. If you missed the segment because you were scrapbooking or sneaking a snack in the storage room, you can watch it here.

I was visited in the green room before I was ’miked up’ by Ronald K. Fried, who produced the segment of The Dick Cavett Show I was on many lunar cycles ago with Alfred Kazin, Jack Beatty, and, though we both blanked on the name at the time, John Leonard. (Strange that we would blank on Leonard since he was at his near peak of NY Times critic and columnist popularity at the time, but Kazin pretty much eclipsed us all with ponderous eminence.) Fried is currently working as a producer on Alec Baldwin’s MSNBC show, which I assume keeps him hopping.

[And let me digress for a moment to state: while whatever Alec Baldwin said in the heat of the moment to the paparazzo was probably admonishment-worthy, I am solidly pro-Alec Baldwin and am not going to jump ship on him now, and not just because I can’t swim.]

RKF: In The Spooky Art, a wonderful book that you edited, Mailer said that whatever else it does, a novel reveals the character of the novelist. So what do Norman Mailer’s novels reveal about his character?

__JML:__Well, they reveal that he lived in a numinous world where there were forces all around him. Let’s say that not everyone shares that belief today. But he would walk in the room, and the way the furniture was set up would give him a shiver, and he would say, “Something bad is going to happen.” He was very open to all sorts of omens, portents, and forces. He was sometimes afraid to go out of the house on the full moon. So he lived in what you almost might say was a medieval world. He had a medieval world view in which there were angels and devils and demons and forces all around him all the time. You know he told me once that he had been attacked by a succubus [female demon]. I didn’t put it in the book because I didn’t have enough to thread it out. It was just a kind of passing remark. He told me that it happened in Provincetown. He pointed to the house. But I could never get him to talk about it in any detail. He said it was a very unpleasant experience. So he lived in that world, and yet he was raised and educated as a rational, thinking Jewish intellectual, Marx and Freud, and Spengler and so forth.

And so he had that rational side to him, and then he had the transcendental side. I think his books reveal that everything about Mailer is doubled. There are dueling personalities, there are dueling points of view all the time jostling within of all his books and certainly within his own character. He could be the most rational, thoughtful person you ever met, and then he could also sound like you were dealing with a medium sometimes.

I would call it coincidence except that there are no coincidences in Mailer’s numinati that no sooner had I read the interview with Lennon than I opened a package that arrived a few minutes earler containing the latest issue of The Mailer Review, much of it devoted to Lennon’s biography and the just-published anthology of Mailer’s work Mind of an Outlaw.

It looks to be an especially rich issue, featuring also a never before published short story by Mailer called ’Love-Buds’ that was written while at Harvard; Dick Russell’s memoir about Mailer’s involvement in the Dynamite Club, an informal brain trust devoted to dissecting and decoding the Kennedy assassination, the CIA, Watergate, and the entire shadow world of espionage and skullduggery; and, completing the circle, Ronald K. Fried’s essay on Mailer’s boxing coverage.

Because of the upheaval caused by moving, apartment renovation, bringing out a book, and so on, I’ve been unable to attend any of the annual Mailer conferences, but I’d like to go next year, especially if it’s held some place academic and distinguished, like Las Vegas.